Things we should own together Artificial Intelligence John Alt If we project the logical trajectory of artificial intelligence (AI) it seems to be unavoidable that…
China’s greening steel industry signals an economic reality check for Australia Christoph Nedopil Australia has flourished as an export powerhouse for decades. Much of this…
I went into a weeks-long crash, unable to do much of anything but lie in bed with my migraine cap on, reflecting on what I wish had gone differently over the last several years. Sometimes I think about the week I caught the virus, but more often I think about life before the pandemic entirely. A world with no virus, I imagine. Some random combination of events strings together differently, back there in the fall of 2019. It all works out the way it didn’t. SARS-COV-2 never infects a human, or never makes it to this side of the Pacific. What would life be like?
I recently wrote about how much time I spend wandering around in my memories, revisiting friends, concerts, parties, bars, even jobs and trips to the gym. It’s strange though; even old photos have an air of doom about them. Like there’s a ticking clock over my head. 18 months until everything changes, I think. I didn’t know.
The latest FOI annual report from the government shows that:
During the first two years of the Albanese government, there were about 21,000 requests determined per year – the lowest since the Gillard government (20,000 requests in 2010–11).
But in 2010–11, the total cost of administering the FOI system was $36 million – compared to $70 million in 2022–23 and $86 million in 2023–24.
Determining half again as many FOI requests (34,000) only cost the Howard Government $25 million to administer in 2006–07.
On this episode of After America, Professor Elizabeth Saunders from Columbia University joins Dr Emma Shortis to discuss the extreme volatility of this administration’s foreign policy and how Trump is breaking down the guardrails of American democracy.
This episode was recorded on Thursday 28 August.
You can sign our petition calling on the Australian Government to launch a parliamentary inquiry into AUKUS.
Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available now via the Australia Institute website.
Guest: Elizabeth N Saunders, Professor of Political Science, Columbia University // @profsaunders
Host: Emma Shortis, Director, International & Security Affairs, the Australia Institute // @emmashortis
It‘s been revealed that Santos’ Darwin LNG gas export terminal has been leaking large amounts of climate-destroying methane gas for 20 years – and gas companies and governments have failed to act.
This confirms The Australia Institute’s long-held concern that methane emissions are grossly underestimated and Australia’s regulators have been captured by the gas industry.
The reporting confirms that despite all relevant regulators and governments knowing about the leaks, the emissions will continue to go unreported and will not be included in Australia’s greenhouse gas reporting. Incredibly, Santos will be allowed to use the leaking tank until 2050 without fixing it.
It further confirms that the Northern Territory EPA (NTEPA), the CSIRO, the Clean Energy Regulator (CER), the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA), and NT WorkSafe all knew about the leak – and did nothing.
Santos will receive all the gas from the Barossa gas field that will feed its leaking Darwin LNG export terminal for free, as the Australian government will not charge it royalties. It is also very unlikely to pay Petroleum Resource Rent Tax and, according to the most recent AT0 Corporate Tax Transparency data, Santos LTD has paid virtually no company tax since 2016.
“Trust, it is constantly observed, is hard-earned and easily dissipated. It is valuable social capital and not to be squandered.
“If there are no guarantees to be had, we need to place trust with care. This can be hard. The little shepherd boy who shouted ‘Wolf! Wolf!’ eventually lost his sheep, but we note not before his false alarms had deceived others time and again. Deception and betrayal often work.
“Traitors and terrorists, embezzlers and con artists, forgers and plagiarists, false promisers and free riders cultivate then breach others’ trust. They often get away with it. Breach of trust has been around since the Garden of Eden – although it did not quite work out there.
“Now it is more varied and more ingenious, and often successful.”
Modern politics has created the perfect storm for a lack of trust in government and, by association, fractures in our society and the “social cohesion” our politicians hold up as reason, excuse and driver.
One of the ways they destroy trust is through secrecy and half-truths.
The Labor government has still not released the National Climate Risk Assessment analysis, which has been described by those who have seen it as “dire and “extremely confronting” as it continues to obfuscate on setting its 2035 climate target.
Believe it or not, in 2025, with Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions from transport at a near-record high, the Productivity Commission is more worried about subsidies for electric vehicles that account for just 1 per cent of the cars on our roads than it is about subsidies for the enormous 4WDs that have come to dominate our suburban streets in the past decade.
At the same time that the commission insists productivity in the housing market requires cutting back “red tape”, it is recommending a climate resilience code that would add regulation to the same industry. Pick a lane, commission people.
Let’s start with cars. The commission has suggested incentives for electric vehicles, such as the fringe benefits tax exemption, should be phased out on the basis that they “distort the market”.
That makes as much sense as arguing we should impose the GST on fresh food because it distorts the market – when distorting the market was the whole point of the tax break.
Economics 101 says we should tax things we want less of and subsidise things we want more of.
If the commission doesn’t think we should have more EVs on the roads, it should say so. But arguing that we should remove subsidies for EVs because they are working as intended is simply absurd.
But the real problem with the PC’s pogrom against EV subsidies is its lack of consistency.
What’s On around Naarm/Melbourne & Regional Victoria: Sep 1-7, 2025 With thanks to the dedicated activists at Friends of the Earth Melbourne! . . See also these Palestine events listings from around the country: 9689
MSO targeted over Gandel link at Melbourne orchestra’s London performance The Age | Alexander Darling & Kerrie O’Brien | 31 August 2025 https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/the-mso-has-blood-on-its-hands-protest-disrupt-melbourne-orchestra-s-london-show-20250830-p5mr3t.html The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra has been silenced during a concert at London’s BBC Proms by protesters angry that it cancelled the performance of a pianist who spoke out against the killing of […]
Tax breaks for investors using homes as short-stay accommodation could be costing Australian taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars per year, according to a new report by Everybody’s Home.
The Short-Stay Subsidy report estimates that this financial year the budget could be losing between $111 million and $556 million in forgone revenue through negative gearing deductions claimed on short-stay rental properties.
Across Australia 167,955 entire homes are estimated to be operating as short-stay accommodation instead of long-term rentals, yet owners can still claim negative gearing and the Capital Gains Tax (CGT) discount.
Finally: Please sign up to get this newsletter in your inbox! There have been delivery issues with the Substack app. Email is more reliable, so if you’d like to hear from me, sign up — it’s free! If you’d like to offer voluntary financial support — and get the perk of submitting a question for the next Q & A — please do so here:
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Food insecurity in Canada represents a pervasive systemic issue that has a devastating population impact, while those most affected by the failings of the food system have little say in its governance. By enabling food democracy through democratic participation, Canadians and citizens everywhere can reclaim control of the food system and enable its transformation. Citizen participation is a critical factor for the development of just and effective policies, and for the health of a democracy. However, public participation in Canada is in crisis as those most affected by the issues are either excluded from public processes or experience significant barriers to participation. While the minimalist model of democratic governance equates democracy with casting votes during an election, other models see active citizen participation in civil society and public discourses as necessary for democratic stability. 1
The march is advertised as being about ending mass immigration. Of course, there is no “correct” level of immigration to Australia – this will always be a democratic question that’s up for debate. But it’s equally clear that’s not what these protests are really about.
The media and anti-fascism activists have revealed that some of the organisers of the marches have posted white nationalist ideas like “remigration”, including pro-Nazi and pro-Hitler memes, and threatened violence. March for Australia has denied links to some prominent neo-Nazis.
While Australians firmly rejected the Coalition’s harsh anti-immigration rhetoric and policies under Peter Dutton’s leadership, scapegoating immigrants is a sadly effective tactic in politics and in the media.
More than one politician has voiced support for the March for Australia, including independent MP Bob Katter, who threatened to punch a journalist for mentioning his Lebanese heritage when questioning him about his support for the anti-immigration rallies.
–from a poem generated by the DeepSeek R1 AI chatbot
Ray Kurzweil thinks he’ll live forever as a string of ones and zeroes.
During a 2013 interview, the prominent transhumanist writer predicted that humans will “become increasingly non-biological to the point where,” by 2045, “even if [the remaining] biological part went away, it wouldn’t make any difference because the non-biological part already understood it completely.”
In other words, he believes he can perfectly recreate his mind inside a computer and become an immortal virtual superintelligence. Kurzweil and other transhumanists refer to this “profound and disruptive transformation in human capability” as “the Singularity.”
For the sake of taxpayers, let’s hope that the Audit Office is inspecting the AUKUS books closely.
Australian money is flushing into the US submarine construction system – a billion US dollars so far, with another billion by year’s end. What will Australia have to show for it?
Nothing. Except, of course, for a lot of international travel and glad-handing by the naval officers and public servants who work in the Australian Submarine Agency.
Hitherto, the only explanation for totally unsecured payments to the US is our need to contribute to America’s submarine-building capacity so that, at some date that seems to be sliding ineluctably further away, we are able to buy some Virginia-class submarines and embark on our adventure as a nuclear-powered submarine navy. Right now, the US yards cannot meet the demands of the US Navy, let alone ours. They need to double their production rate.
This is a free Notes on the Crises article. A reminder to readers that the various activities run out of the still-new Notes on the Crises office cost money, while an enormous amount of time and effort goes into my writing and my constant dedication to refresh and deepen my expertise on multiple complex and intersecting subjects. Taking out a paid subscription helps support these activities. Final note: thanks to Paul Krugman for his shout out yesterday.
He, of course, was talking about managers, but the same could apply to the members of his party in 2025.
You don’t have to go too far back to trace the origins of the intellectual malaise that afflicts the party. John Howard was unshakeably a conservative and paved the way for what we are seeing now. Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton were the inexorable end point of Howard’s style of leadership, each having further diluted the conservative value beliefs their mentor held dear, while grasping onto Howard’s single-eyed drive for personal power.
Like Tony Abbott before them, they sought to mould the party into their own personal project, but even Abbott could claim an ideologue’s drive.
Morrison and Dutton were slaves to their own personal instincts, which is why their exit from domestic politics has been so seamless. Both disappeared like they were never there, because they weren’t. Not truly.
When their personal ambitions were thwarted, they simply moved on. In their wake, they have left a party barren of any meaning.
Recent growth in Australia’s population has gone through historically big swings, starting with the closure of borders during the Covid pandemic.
This resulted in the population falling, as many people, such as foreign students, left the country. There was a period of about 18 months (from early 2020 to late 2021) where population growth was at historic lows.
When the borders reopened, many people came back and we had a period where the population increased more rapidly.
Since 2024, population growth appears to have fallen back to pre-Covid rates.
But has the bounce-back in population been larger than the slowdown during Covid? To see that, we need to project growth assuming that the population grew at the average pre-Covid rate.
If we do, we can see that the actual population is lower than it would have been if the Covid pandemic had not occurred. The actual growth in the population is the blue line and the projected number without the pandemic is the dotted orange line.
It is rare to find war correspondents who are willing to break the rules of access and safety imposed by dominant powers. Only by challenging these structures and facing the dangers of war can journalists begin a true effort to report the truth and, if they are lucky, materially alter the course of conflict.
Journalist, author and documentary filmmaker Ben Anderson joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to detail what it means to be a reporter who is committed to chasing and documenting the truth in a media landscape that often chooses complacency.
The data is buried in a footnote of the latest government inventory of greenhouse gas emissions. It reveals that the Moomba CCS project, owned by Santos, captured just half a megatonne of emissions in the first quarter of 2025.
World-renowned climate analyst and Senior Research Fellow at The Australia Institute, Ketan Joshi, says this equates to just 4.6 days’ worth of Santos’ total emissions and just 1.6 days’ worth of domestic emissions from Australia’s fossil fuel industries.
“In a full year, Santos will, at most, capture about 4.3% of their total emissions – yet it was paid $15 million from the Morrison government to fund this carbon capture and storage facility,” said Ketan Joshi, Senior Research Fellow at The Australia Institute.
“If that’s not bad enough, they are now being issued carbon offsets for the use of the CCS facility, which means that another polluter can buy the offsets from this facility to greenwash their emissions, as well.
“The truth is, carbon capture and storage is one of the biggest false promises in the fight against climate change.
“CCS is a fantasy policy at a time when Australia and the world need the exact opposite – real action to reduce real emissions on the road to real zero. Rather than dodgy offsets and questionable carbon capture and storage projects, it’s time to stop new gas and coal projects.”
Andrew Beck has articulated a thick version of the assimilation of immigrants (rightly so, in my view) that harkens back to the spirit of Americanization that was prevalent from the Founding to roughly the 1960s. Louis Brandeis, a liberal and political ally of the detestable Woodrow Wilson, expressed this common idea of assimilation in his July 5, 1915, Americanization Day Speech:
What is Americanization? It manifests itself, in a superficial way, when the immigrant adopts the clothes, the manners and the customs generally prevailing here. Far more important is the manifestation presented when he substitutes for his mother tongue the English language as the common medium of speech. But the adoption of our language, manners, and customs in only a small part of the process. To become Americanized the change wrought must be fundamental. However great his outward conformity, the immigrant is not Americanized unless his interests and affections have become deeply rooted here. And we properly demand of the immigrants even more than this. He must be brought into complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations and cooperate with us for their attainment. Only when this has been done will he possess the national consciousness of an American.
‘Making the Good Society’ is a video series from the Broadbent Institute and Perspectives Journal that asks progressive leaders and thinkers about their vision for a good society that is humane, just, and democratic.
Since being elected President of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union in 2022, JP Hornick has seen the Canadian labour movement reach new heights. From flight attendants to postal workers, teachers and amusement park ride inspectors, from the PNE to the CNE, Canadian workers have achieved big wins in recent years, in what JP sees as a rising tide across the labour movement.
At its meeting today, the Payments System Board discussed a number of issues, including the regulatory response to the CHESS batch failure incident in December 2024, the annual Assessment of the ASX clearing and settlement facilities against the Financial Stability Standards, the RBA’s oversight of international financial market infrastructures, the system wide resilience of the Australian payments system, the future of cash distribution arrangements, review of Merchant Card Payment Costs and Surcharging and global developments in stablecoins.
In a world of high policy uncertainty, central banks are relying more on soft information sources to complement traditional economic statistics and model-based forecasts. One valuable source of soft information comes from intelligence gathered through central bank liaison programs – structured programs in which central bank staff regularly talk with firms to gather insights. This paper introduces a new text analytics and retrieval tool that efficiently processes, organises, and analyses liaison intelligence gathered from firms using modern natural language processing techniques. The textual dataset spans around 25 years, integrates new information as soon as it becomes available, and covers a wide range of business sizes and industries. The tool uses both traditional text analysis techniques and powerful language models to provide analysts and researchers with three key capabilities: (1) quickly querying the entire history of business liaison meeting notes; (2) zooming in on particular topics to examine their frequency (topic exposure) and analysing the associated tone and uncertainty of the discussion; and (3) extracting precise numerical values from the text, such as firms' reported figures for wages and prices growth. We demonstrate how these capabilities are useful for assessing economic conditions by generating text-based indicators of wages growth and incorporating them into a nowcasting model.
On this episode of Dollars & Sense, Matt and Elinor discuss why the latest inflation data isn’t anything to panic about, the case for economy-wide price gouging laws, and why Australia Post has stopped sending many packages to the United States.
Early bird tickets for our Revenue Summit at Parliament House in Canberra – Hon. Steven Miles MP, Senator David Pocock, Kate Chaney MP, Greg Jericho and more – are available now. You can buy tickets for the early bird price of $99 – available for a limited time only.
Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available now via the Australia Institute website.
This discussion was recorded on Thursday 28 August 2025.
Host: Matt Grudnoff, Senior Economist, the Australia Institute // @mattgrudnoff
Host: Elinor Johnston-Leek, Senior Content Producer, the Australia Institute // @elinorjohnstonleek
August was another busy month at the Australia Institute!
With Parliament sitting, the economic roundtable and more, there was already a lot going on! And we were still releasing new research, holding events, press conferences, the list goes on.
Watch a select highlight of content and media from the Australia Institute in August 2025.
Conservatives often imagine that winning statewide elections means gaining control over the machinery of government. But this is wrong—and dangerously so. For far too long, red states have confused the two. The assumption that political victory automatically confers political authority is one of the chief falsehoods circulating on the Right. It is the reason Republican states often look like Democratic ones, only with different bumper stickers.
This is an uncomfortable but necessary message for conservatives to hear: red states are facing a major crisis of governance.
The State Leadership Initiative’s new Index Report lays out the evidence in extensive detail. By the most basic measures of lean, accountable, and ideologically grounded government, red states are failing. Many of the policies their representatives are voting for and their governors are signing into law are profoundly out of step with the wishes of voters. Bureaucracies are bloated, universities multiply administrators faster than scholars, there are fewer teachers than administrators in schools, New York-style regulations pile up in red states like Texas, and seven of the ten most federally dependent states wear the Republican label.
The key takeaway is not just that red states are doing poorly—it is that red states are almost indistinguishable from blue states on the metrics that matter.
Update at 6:00 CST: Whoa, there are over 80 questions! I’ve got to shut questions down so I can read them all and keep the Q & A at a reasonable length. Themes addressed by multiple people will get top priority. I hope to have the new article up by the end of the week. Thanks, everyone!
On this episode of Follow the Money, manufacturing industry representative Geoff Crittenden and Australia Institute Principal Advisor Mark Ogge join Ebony Bennett to discuss how governments can ensure there’s more gas available for Australians.
Dead Centre: How political pragmatism is killing us by Richard Denniss is available now via the Australia Institute website.
Guest: Geoff Crittenden, Chief Executive Officer, WELD Australia
Guest: Mark Ogge, Principal Advisor, the Australia Institute // @markogge
Host: Ebony Bennett, Deputy Director, the Australia Institute // @ebonybennett
The American Mind’s ‘Editorial Roundtable’ podcast is a weekly conversation with Ryan Williams, Spencer Klavan, and Mike Sabo devoted to uncovering the ideas and principles that drive American political life. Stream here or download from your favorite podcast host.
Chips Ahoy | The Roundtable Ep. 282
Trump has reached a deal with semiconductor chip maker Intel to land the government a 10% stake in the firm. It’s a potential safeguard against China in an uncertain age but also a potentially troubling intervention into the market. There are also rumblings about sending the National Guard into Chicago, which would really be an error—but maybe it’s all just lib-baiting. Meanwhile in the UK, a teen girl was arrested after allegedly brandishing a knife and hatchet at an immigrant man by whom she felt threatened, aggravating tensions over the country’s influx of culturally disconnected and often violent immigrants. The guys sit down this week to discuss the happenings in Trump-world and beyond—plus more media recommendations!
“Remember,” Nigel Farage said in late July in his office near Parliament, “I am the moderate…reasonable…democratic…experienced…grown-up face of the fightback. If I lose, just you wait.”
For nearly 30 years, Farage (rhymes with “barrage”) has been the most influential British voice of what he calls the fightback, and his detractors call populism. At the turn of this century, as a member of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), he fought to “save the pound” at a time when London elites hoped to abandon England’s ancient currency for the European Union’s Euro. The pound survived, and in 2010 the Euro crashed. Almost alone among top politicians back then, Farage called for Britain to leave the E.U. outright. By 2016, a majority of his countrymen agreed. They broke their European ties in the so-called Brexit referendum, even if three years of parliamentary and judicial chicanery delayed Britain’s exit till 2020. (See “Why Hasn’t Brexit Happened?,” Summer 2019.) Winsome, bibulous, half-prophet and half-clown, he has a habit of being vindicated.
Many American Founders, including our first four presidents, hoped to establish a national university that would educate statesmen for the new republic. During his second term, George Washington was presented with what seemed to be a golden opportunity to accomplish this goal—and rejected it on cultural grounds.
In 1794, the Swiss exile François d’Ivernois had written to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, whom he knew from their years of diplomatic service in France. His home city of Geneva was suffering “convulsions” due to “the great political drama which now agitates Europe,” namely the French Revolution, whose terror had recently reached its nadir but whose fervor was still disrupting neighboring countries. D’Ivernois, himself “too much a republican” for the Calvinist Republic of Geneva but “too little a republican” for Revolutionary France, proposed a scheme “to transport into one of your Provinces our Academy [the University of Geneva] completely organised, and with it its means of public instruction.” At a stroke, it seems, Washington could have whisked away one of Europe’s premier universities and established it in the American republic.
Washington balked. “That a national University in this country is a thing to be desired, has always been my decided opinion,” but he doubted the ability of “an entire Seminary of foreigners, who may not understand our language,” to “be assimilated.” As Washington explained to Adams:
Special announcement: As I said Friday, I have secured a fiscal sponsor for Notes on the Crises. That fiscal sponsor is the organization the “Alternative News Foundation” (ANF). What that means in practice is that people can make tax deductible donations to Notes on the Crises. I will have an email laying out more of these details and laying out other options for donations such as venmo, paypal or physical check. For now, those who want to donate can find Notes on the Crises on the popular non-profit fundraising platform Fundrazr.
Hello readers, an hour ago I had an Op Ed published in Politico about the Federal Reserve. For those that didn’t hear, late last night Trump declared that he fired Lisa Cook over the “mortgage fraud” allegations I mentioned last Friday. Apparently I had my finger on the pulse of events.
